[snip a bunch of insulting twaddle accusing me of poor reading
comprehension]
I know what your point is.
So? You disagree? If so come right out and say it. No more of this
dancing around the issue or switching sides already! If you're going
to argue with me then argue with me! Sheesh!
No, that wasn't my point. My point was that "Software does not need to
be 100% compatible in order to be an alternative". This does not
contradict your "I should not pay a tax" point.
Then you have lost on that point. If I argue that as a consumer I
should have option X and you attempt to "rebut" that with something
completely orthogonal, then I win, don't I?
was intended to contradict your assertion that Software needs to be 100%
compatible in order to be an alternative. Is this clearer now?
As mud. For a software system to be a viable alternative, you must be
able to:
* Accomplish the same goals with it
* Read the same document formats with it
* Output the same formats
An "office substitute" that won't read MSWord files is NFG. Image
editing software with no color management, etc. Depending on your
needs of course.
Currently there's often no escaping MS or other commercial software if
you have specific requirements. If you don't, then great! But if you
do the market currently won't satisfy you with real competition, and
that is a problem.
Again, you've snipped too much. You only presented 2
commercial-quality free games, but 1 of them turned out to be a commercial
game. So basically there exists 1 commercial-quality free game (Enemy
Territory), and a lot more commercial games.
If it's free, but still commercial (so they make money some other way
than selling copies), then it counts.
The fact that you can't "recall any offhand" shows that there probably
aren't that many commercial-quality free games out there.
There are. I just don't know about many of them. YOU were the one
asking for an exhaustive list; YOU can just fucking google it.
There are lots of excellent rock bands. I know of a few. I'm sure
there are dozens whose names I can't recall offhand. That doesn't
constitute evidence that there are very few excellent rock bands!
SCO tried the same trick you did: They claimed there existed proof
that *nux belonged to them. When asked to show the proof, they told the
courts to find it themselves. The courts ruled against SCO in the end.
SCO was suing someone and so the burden of proof was on them to
substantiate their claims.
You are supporting nasty, freedom-damaging IP laws, so the burden is
on you to prove that these restrictions on freedoms are necessary to
the public good. That's because this is a free country, and the burden
of proof is therefore ALWAYS on those seeking to create or maintain
restrictions on freedoms to show that they are better than all freedom-
preserving alternatives.
I am not required then to do what you demand here.
It's also "plainly obvious" that people will make less money from
selling information, and thus be less tempted to produce information. My
"proof" is just as strong as your "proof" in this regard.
People will not be "less tempted to produce information". Producing
information is often a goal in itself, rather than a means to an end
(such as getting rich), and when it's not, it's often a side effect of
something else. And information can be a loss-leader to promote other
things. Anyway "selling information" is an intrinsically brittle and
broken way to try to make money, because ipso facto it's easily copied
and recopied. The money made is far less than the giant hidden costs
of trying to enforce anti-copying laws, rules, or contracts. It's just
that right now copyright holders reap the revenues but pass those
hidden costs on to everyone in the form of taxes or in other ways, and
directly in the price tag some of which goes to pay their legal fees
when they aggressively sue suspected infringers. This is woefully
inefficient and broken from both a public policy AND a plain-old-
economics perspective.
The nastiest parts of the hidden costs are the subtle but serious
effects -- chillings of free/critical speech (fair use defenses are
still expensive to use in court, even if you will win, and you may not
have the money); orphan and ghost works ... the list goes on.
Nevermind that free copies will abound anyway; you could spend
*trillions* on an enforcement effort and it will still be a token
effort with little real effect except to terrorize people and create
risks and uncertainties for people massively out of proportion to any
"crime" they might be contemplating. You have to compete with free
whether you want to or not; but it is possible.
And nevermind the perverse incentive to create crap and heavily market
it. You claim copyright increases the quality of video games. But how
much UTTER CRAP is produced because it is cheap to produce crap but it
can be sold for an exorbitant price for a while before the buying
public catches on? Especially when you can hype it up with the
traditional marketing machine first? How many bad movies, crummy
books, and awful application suites are nonetheless quite profitable
compared to what was sunk into making them? In the software area alone
we have terrible operating systems, crummy system utilities (trading
on the once-proud Norton brand, no less), atrocious accounting
packages, and hideous office suites, most of them from just three
horrible vendors: M$, Symantec, and Intuit -- alone responsible for as
many as a third of the gripes at
http://www.gripe2ed.com would you
believe.
Care to define "cultural participation"? People who do not work for
Disney have been making animations just fine.
Yeah, by working for Pixar or Time-Warner or whoever else.
And you can't participate by making your own fanfic without permission
from one giant corporation or another.
Or translate your favorite book into a language the publisher didn't
deign to cover. Or ...
There simply has to be a better way. There is no incentive to find
better ways of subsidizing, marketing, and distributing content while
the existing laws are still in place; the path of least resistance is
to be evil instead and leave half the potential market in the lurch
while overcharging the other half thousands of times costs.
That things like the free software movement flourish despite not being
on that path of least resistance is remarkable (and encouraging).
And perhaps there won't be much interesting things left to share.
Evidence?
Stop simply guessing that all creativity will magically come to a stop
when copyright is gone. Do you honestly believe there was no
creativity before copyright law? (Considering how unnatural it was,
surely coming up with copyright itself was somewhat creative, if evil
or, at best, misguided?)
Why does the fashion industry thrive and innovate madly with rampant
copying? Maybe *because* rapid imitation forces a given company to
endlessly keep innovating to stay a step ahead of the competition?
Could it be that, in fact, easy copying incentivizes innovation far
more than having exclusive rights to restrict copying and set
arbitrary and exorbitant prices does? Especially as you can
incrementally innovate on an existing product without having to
reinvent the wheel or else pay someone else's exorbitant prices?
A lot of those huge costs in e.g. videogame development result from
having to pay the giants whose shoulders you stand on, you know. You
worry about video game quality without copyright law? Well suppose
someone makes a good engine. Later anyone who wants to can use that
engine in a new game. They don't have to make their own engine at huge
expense, or pay for an existing engine at huge expense. They can use
that existing engine for free! So their own costs are down to custom
assets and suchlike. More generally, lots of stuff becomes free to
reuse. Like the gameplay of a game whose graphics are bad and engine
sucky? Try porting it to a better engine. Or make better art. Release
your incremental improvement. Someone else might make further
improvements. Eventually one version may be of top-notch quality and
highly popular. Lack of copyrights will make this possible. Copyright
law on the other hand almost *enforces* a monolithic development model
where it all has to be developed in-house, by paid labor, from the
ground up, at huge expense, and then there are huge costs to recoup
which seem to justify outrageous per-copy fees ... and even bigger
fees for anyone wanting to use your engine instead of make their
own ... perpetuating the problem.
MOST OF THE HUGE COSTS COPYRIGHT ROYALTIES LET YOU RECOUP QUICKLY ARE
CAUSED, EVENTUALLY, BY COPYRIGHT ROYALTIES! Even more so when you
consider copyrights and patents combined.
Depending on your definition of "proven"...
Oh come on. Most of those good things follow from abolition as surely
as mathematical theorems. The regained freedoms to do as we please
with all of the objects we physically own are one good thing that's
pretty much automatic -- can't fail to result. And rapid scanning and
preservation of rare books, orphan works, etc. by Google and others
seems inevitable too once they can do it without risk of lawsuits.
And, you know, not-so-rich people who wish to make money via selling
information, such as programmers, authors, artists, etc.
Hardly anyone makes non-negligible money from copyright royalties.
Programmers least of all; they're salaried rank and file grunts. In
the music business you get a single amount up-front for the rights to
a song from the RIAA. If you're REALLY FREAKING LUCKY, the RIAA
decides to heavily promote instead of bury it, AND it gets popular,
AND the RIAA is able to recoup all their expenses, and THEN you may
see the odd thin dime of royalty money. Better to get paid by a
philanthropist and the music gets freed if you ask me. Books likewise
-- the average author gets a small amount of money for the rights to
something they wrote. $150 or $200 for an article. Maybe a few
thousand for a novel "they" decide to publish. Only if they write some
bestsellers do they get real bargaining power with the publishing
industry such that they can get royalties for their *next* novel, as
well as much larger advance fees. Very few authors reach that status.
Fact is most creative people are actually paid just a fixed amount for
doing a given bit of information-producing work. A paltry amount more
often than not. The bulk of any royalties from every copy selling at
an exorbitant markup goes to the big publishing and distribution
company rather than the creative person. Copyright royalties, by and
large, benefit corporations but not creative individuals. The
individuals they chiefly benefit wear expensive designer suits and
have nary a creative bone in their body.
Almost any other system of remunerating creative individuals has to be
better than this one!
I've explained it in an earlier post: Reduced term copyright
protection. You get the benefit of more freedom, without entirely removing
the incentive to produce content.
What "more freedom"? Copyright protection restricts you the same no
matter what the term lengths are. I want to own my computer and
storage media, goddamnit! As long as there is anything resembling
copyright law I don't seem to -- there are things I can't do in
private with them by law, which is just plain wrong!
Well, I don't agree with everything you say. You're free, of course,
to stop arguing at any time you wish.
And let you have the last word? You wish.
You seem to be contradicting yourself, then.
Ex-fucking-scuse me?!
Well, actually, you do, as long as you take into consideration the IP
owners when thinking of "consenting parties".
The author of a book is not a party to a transaction involving someone
else and another someone else, even where a copy of a book they wrote
is involved. They are not present, and the book is not theirs unless
it was physically stolen.
And you think if 0 day copyright was all they had left tomorrow, the
same forces wouldn't be able to push it up into infinity as well?
Not if a constitutional amendment were written amending the Progress
Clause, to say something like "To promote the Progress of Science and
the useful Arts, Congress shall have no power to grant any monopolies
or exclusive rights to any writings or inventions, or to forbid the
free copying and reverse-engineering thereof." It's interesting to
wonder how the US would have turned out if this had been the original
version...
You make it sound like you think I deliberately did something to kill
off all the decent FTP sites and other file hosts simply to win some
argument here. How paranoid of you. Even if I had the power to do that
why in Christ's name would you think I would? I would LOVE for there
to be some decent no-strings file hosting out there!
Yes, that was what I meant when I said "I wasn't talking about
ratios".
But obviously you're still ultimately thinking about the crappy games
instead of the good ones, which is incorrect.
So in other words, there's still only Enemy Territory. All other
commercial-quality games are commercial.
Non-sequitur.
[snip another insulting comparison to SCO]
**** off.
I assume the reason why you snipped this challenge was because you
were unable to overcome it.
No, it's because the burden of proof is on YOU, asswipe. YOU are the
one arguing in favor of the position that imposes greater restrictions
on peoples' freedoms. YOU prove those restrictions make for a better
world than freer alternatives!
Prove your assertion by meeting the challenge mentioned above.
Again, the burden of proof isn't on me, but again, talented teams on
free projects are easy to find. Eclipse ... Linux ... Java itself is
semi-proprietary (and getting less proprietary lately) but copies are
free ... the list goes on.
I don't dispute that "it is possible". I dispute that it is as easy to
get people to work on a free game as it is to get people to work on a
commercial game.
If someone's inclination is to game design and related areas, and the
opportunity-cost of doing something else is higher, they'll do game
design. Right now, if someone has the talent (and the political
connections, and the various other irrelevancies such as fancy suits
to wear to an interview and irrelevant interview-passing skills and
suchlike) the opportunity-cost of working on a game with copies
costing money is lower than that of working on a game with free copies
on average. Without copyright law, they all have free copies, and it's
just a matter of whether the opportunity-cost of, say, flipping
burgers is lower than the opportunity-cost of working on a game with
free copies. Most likely, they'll find a commercial free-copies game
to work on, or flip burgers part time and work on a free-copies game
part time. Remember also that their cost of living is half what it is
now, if not less.
Commercial-quality commercial games are released
regularly, perhaps in the dozens per year. 2 commercial-quality free game
has ever been released, EVER, and one of them became a commercial game
once it actually became popular, thus reducing the count to 1.
Counter-strike still counts, because the bulk of the development costs
were incurred when it was free. And those 2 are not the only 2 EVER,
they are simply the only 2 *you* personally know about (or, I suspect,
ever want to know about, as the truth is apparently uncomfortable for
you here -- in the interests of disclosure, do *you* make any money
from content in any way, shape, or form?!).
[Another insulting comparison to SCO]
**** off. SCO and I have *nothing* in common. SCO is pro-copyright for
God's sake!
Once again, you snipped too much context, probably because the
arguments embarass you.
No, because nothing you're saying makes any sense.
? You claimed Nehahra should only be compared
against engines developed in the same time frame (e.g. no fair comparing a
2003 engine to a 2007 engine). I pointed out that Nehahra is currently
under active development. At the time of writing, it is 2007. Therefore,
Nehahra sould be compared to a year 2007 engine, such as the Crysis
engine. Is it clear, now?
As mud. What's wrong with comparing a version of Nehahra that was
current in 2003 with other 2003 versions of engines?
The Quake 1 engine (the original, unmodified one) is kind of crummy
compared to contemporary engines. Engines derived from it are still in
use today. Quake 1 itself is still played today. The Quake 1 engine is
therefore "a 2007 engine" and should be compared to contemporary
engines. It comes up short. Therefore commercial engines suck and free
ones are superior!
That's your so-called logic, in a nutshell. I just turned it around
some.
Compare Quake 1's engine with engines that were current at the time it
was first developed (1990s) and suddenly it measures up nicely. Ditto
Nehahra's DarkPlaces engine (itself a Q1 engine derivative) (2003).
I asked you to find a commercial quality free game. You cited Nehahra.
I pointed out how it not good enough to be commercial quality.
At the time it came out it was comparable to many commercial games
that were available at the same time.
Do you now
understand the point, or do you need further clarification?
I understand that you don't have a point, and that you're a
condescending bastard and fancy yourself a smartass.
[snip calling me either incompetent or a liar]
Buzz off.
If you think my opinion is so biased, then you can demonstrate that by
NOT snipping the urls to the screenshot.
Why? They waste space in the response and I don't have a direct
response to any of them.
Let the readers judge for themselves which ones look better.
You make it sound as if I'm somehow preventing that, but surely they
know how to hit the "up" button in their newsreader or, God forbid,
just fucking Google them?
Remember how you claimed that you are the "defender of truth and
justice", and that as long as people posts falsehood, you would point them
out? Well, you and I are similar in that respect.
Except that you apparently attack posts that are true, instead of
posts that are false. Otherwise we would not be on opposing teams
here.
BTW, why is it that you consider my posting a list of screenshots to
be an attack on you?
I don't. I never claimed that I did. You're putting words in my mouth;
how underhanded.
trying to defend your false beliefs?
I have no false beliefs.
Your original claim was that retail games are currently making 3000x
profit margins.
Estimate, not an exact claim. Do not put words into my mouth.
If we suppose one more CD-ROM costs 5 cents to stamp out, that a given
piece of software comes on one CD-ROM, that packaging costs an
additional 5 cents, and that shipping and handling is $4.90, including
retail margins if applicable, then we get $5 of the $60 for a typical
game going to real costs or competitive rents (e.g. retail margins)
and $55 pure profit for the software company. In that case, the profit
margin is 11x.
On the other hand, comparison with the most efficient distribution
mechanism possible, given that you no longer depend on restricting
access for your business model, and the software can be provided via
BitTorrent for maybe two pennies in marginal costs.
I needn't remind you how large a multiple of that $60, or 6000
pennies, is, I hope...
And I'm telling you that's not necessarily true. I'm not sure why you
have difficulty understanding this. Some people may return to game making,
others may stick with movie making or book writing. In fact, many
game-plot writers also write novels. They don't categorize themselves as
"a strictly game person" the way you seem to do.
They'd do whatever their talents inclined them to do. Some write
novels and work on games; and they still would. Others just work on
games; and they still would. Some might have part-time jobs elsewhere.
Some would do it professionally, paid by whatever business models. No
change there, other than that a particular, bad business model
category would no longer be widespread -- those dependent on
restricting copying.
[...]
As I suspected. Thank you.
Huh?
Well, I'm not arguing with your "should" assertions, but I *am*
arguing with your "is" assertions. You assert that Windows *is*
indispensible. I'm showing you why it isn't.
You're wrong. As I said, if you have certain requirements, Windows may
(currently) be indispensible. As in without it you will not have a
system that meets those requirements!
I did not claim to envy the Linux advocate either. I simply am
pointing out to you that Windows is not indispensible.
And I am pointing out to YOU that by your own logic, neither is clean
drinking water or adequate food, shelter, medical care, etc.
That makes "indispensible" a meaningless word. Let's use it to mean
"doing without, while perhaps technically possible, is not something
the average person with whatever requirements can reasonably be
expected to do". Hell, let's just use Microsoft's own obviously strong
market position and not instantly losing nearly 100% market share to
Linux as evidence that Windows is not something you can just toss
aside without difficulty!
I avoid making "should" statements.
You are pathological. You avoid going anywhere where you will be
forced to come to terms with having lost this fight, that's what you
avoid. You can't fight the points I've made that claimed me the moral
high ground, so you resort to nitpicking details in what I wrote and
equivocating quite often, supporting this and then that and then its
opposite ... and then claiming you're doing nothing of the kind and
just arguing for the sake of arguing. Hell, maybe that's exactly what
you're doing. You show no signs of having a coherent position, not
even "whatever Twisted says is wrong"
This is a "should" statement in disguise, without the explicit
"should" statement.
Cop-out. You're dodging the very heart of the issue, which is whether
Microsoft's hefty price tags (for starters) are somehow justified for
the social good.
Yes, usually when you spend money on a product, you gain the benefits
of that product. And when you don't spend money on a product, you are "in
some ways cramped or deprived". That's how "buying stuff" works. I've
already explained this to you.
The problem being that the price tag on Windows is vastly in excess of
what one copy costs to provide. Linux is superior in many respects,
and these days inferior in nearly none, yet available gratis --
proving that it costs virtually nothing to provide an OS (or Linux's
spread would not be economically sustainable -- yet it clearly is).
Ultimately the Windows lock-in results from the gratuitous costs of
switching away from Windows, purposely engineered by Microsoft to
secure monopoly power. They've been officially found to have monopoly
power by a court of law. Yet you see nothing wrong with this?
I have no objection to "buying stuff or doing without", so long as I
have the option to buy it at commodity prices (i.e. not much above the
marginal cost of providing the "stuff" to me). It's the denial of that
option sometimes that I find unjustifiable.
Factually true. IP means that Bill Gates, despite his wealth, is still
owed money by anyone using Microsoft software creating demand for more
copies. IP means continuing to support a system where someone who
creates something is owed money for every copy, even long after he's
recouped all his costs in making the original, even after he's gotten
filthy rich from this endless gravy train, even after he's become the
RICHEST PERSON ON THE PLANET that way, and even when he's SEVENTY
YEARS IN HIS FUCKING GRAVE!!
You cannot hide from this necessary implication of IP laws!!
YOU ARE WRONG!!
I think it's more a matter of you insulting yourself than me insulting
you...it's more because you said such falsehood in the first place, rather
than because I posted the correct information later on.
So now you're insulting me again, this time by calling me a liar? Nice
fucking guy!
Go to hell.
That you assume I support corporate-welfare laws is something I find
amusing
I am not assuming anything. You stated it outright -- you're not in
favor of completely abolishing IP laws. IP laws are corporate welfare
(albeit somewhat in disguise).
I guess you don't know what "least" means: It means that if you take
all the things under consideration, and measure them according to one
metric, there will exist at least one such thing such that the metric
yields a lowest score. "least" refers to that particular score. Therefore,
as long as you list at least one business model, one of them will be the
"least unreasonable".
Stop splitting hairs. You know damn well what I was objecting to;
namely the implication that the business models I suggested were not
reasonable. An implication you made deliberately, asshole.
You don't really go in for intellectual honesty when debating, now, do
you?!
This is similar to "least" explained above. If you have a plan that
yields anywhere between 1 and 100 "goodness points", and I have a plan
that yields anywhere between "1 and 1000 "goodness points", then at worst,
my plan is as bad as your plan, but there's a good chance it's better.
No, my plan might turn out in practise to yield 50 while yours yields
only 10. In which case mine is better. So it's not true that "at
worst" your plan is "as bad as" my plan. It could in fact be strictly
worse than my plan.
But without trademark (or IP laws in general), then the above is NOT
fraud. I am genuinely calling my porn company "Disney". I'm not trying to
fool deceive anybody, or anything like that. I simply think "Disney" is a
good name, and since there's no IP laws in our hypothetical situation, I'm
free to use it if I want. Similarly with the title of the movie, and
similarly with the pictures.
Then it will be simply a matter of consumer self-defense through
collaborative rating. If a particular video is a porn video, that fact
will be associated with its hash on the internet and people with
appropriate software will be able to filter out (or seek out) that
category of videos. (This assumes a sane, 21st century distribution
model involving the net, p2p type load-distribution means of
distributing data, and voluntary censorship by self-administered
filtering software.)
Or if you think it would be really necessary (say for physical media)
have laws requiring content ratings be present and accurate. Easy to
guess which "Disney" the "Disney" video rated R or NC-17 is from.
Yes, but you've never asked me for a proof.
This is ludicrous. Your *whole argument* against abolishing IP hinges
on these phantom bad consequences, and you never thought maybe the
existence and likelihood of these consequences would need establishing
before your argument could be convincing??
Or maybe you know that they are unlikely and largely nonexistent and
hoped never to have to confront these facts...
And so are you, apparently [something insulting]. You claimed that I keep changing my
position, and now I've demonstrated that I haven't. I'm glad that's
settled.
No, it is not settled -- certainly not in any way that implies that I
am [something insulting] and, worse, than I actually *agreed* I was
[something insulting], when nothing could be further from the truth!
You argue incoherently. When I make a point, you dispute it, but when
challenged, you claim to have been disputing something else instead.
Basically you admit to having made a straw man argument when you do
that, except not quite, because you seemed to be (and, I think, were)
disputing my original point directly and only changed your claim later
when your original position proved untenable.
So I say Microsoft's products do poorly versus quality competing ones
(e.g. IIS and Apache; server-side Linux and Windows) when on a level
playing field; you attack me. I point to evidence I was right, and you
then claim instead that IIS, say, has the more aggressive marketing
campaign, which isn't anything related to my original point. And so
on.
You're either intellectually dishonest, crazy, terminally confused by
plain English at a not-too-high grade level of writing, or just plain
weird.
You sound surprised. Did you seriously think that if you made a false
assumption, there would be zero risk of it being pointed out to you?
I don't make false assumptions, and I don't take kindly to being
falsely accused of doing so. Stop insulting me at once.
How unfortunate.
Wiseass.
That's not what I said. You're changing the description of the "bug".
Originally, you said an I-beam was involved. There is no I-beam in list
view; at least, not with my eye-candy settings (I don't know about yours).
The I-beam is a visual indicator in some modes of which two items it
considers you to be pointing between, but its absence just makes it
harder to be sure if a drop landing in an unexpected place is a bug or
just a near-miss by the user if it appears say one item to the side of
where expected.
Anyway the list (and details) view misses an I-beam for the simple
reason that successive items are arrayed vertically, then
horizontally, instead of the other way around. A horizontal beam would
have had to be used instead, but there's apparently no native API for
providing a sideways insertion-point indicator in Windows, so there's
simply none.
Regardless, the bug is well-demonstrated in any instance where the
dropped object appears an enormous distance away from the mouse
pointer both in pixels and in there being multiple rows or columns of
items between the pointer/drop site and the actual site of appearance.
It's unrealistic to suppose the user "missed" by that large a
distance, and rounding to the nearest column or row from a near-miss
should still land it within say 2 rows and 2 columns of the drop site.
If it appears 6 columns and 70 rows away there's definitely a problem,
and I see that sort of thing happen routinely.
The bug is probably limited to when "auto arrange" is turned on, which
is supposed to snap dropped objects to the grid. I'm guessing the bug
is in the grid-snapping code and the code responsible for rearranging
all the objects that come after the drop site in the display order.
It's unrelated to the sort options, since there's no automatic
continuous sort (and it's clear that "auto arrange" is supposed to
purely be a grid-snap and no-overlap, but not an auto-sort-again,
feature).
A related bug only seems to happen when there's, say, a couple of
thousand items in tiles view. Then even dragging items inside of a
single window that are towards the bottom often jumps them to the
bottom, or even to the top or otherwise causes more complex
rearrangements of the items.
I'm thinking Explorer is simply kludgy and broken; the code is
probably like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Or maybe H.
P. Lovecraft... I don't suppose there's a good free file manager that
replicates its basic look and feel and interface but actually works
properly? (And is available for Windows! So don't go suggesting some
obscure KDE/Gnome file manager...)
The laws of this world don't allow a software EULA to be binding.
Yeah, but we weren't talking about this world. We were talking about
the hypothetical world, remember? [snip insults]
What hypothetical world? One where such things are binding? It's easy
to see that that world is the worse one. But it's also irrelevant. The
original discussion in this area was what was and wasn't binding in
this world, and under what (if any) legal theory this world's laws
could possibly support enforceability of these nastygrams.
So if anyone's attacking a straw man here it's YOU. As usual.
[snip implied insults and more HTML tag spew]
Fix your bloody newsreader. I hate running into raw HTML tags in
what's supposed to be plain text, especially non-well-formed HTML.
Clicking a button, unwitnessed, in a solo interaction with a piece of
software and signing, with a witness, a document after negotiating
with somebody are two very different things.
Those were two extremes.
Signing a document unwitnessed, but where (a copy of) the signed
document is made available to others, is a third case, and lies closer
to one end than the other. There's documentation of your having
"agreed" to something that can be produced later when evidence of such
is desired by someone. Say someone who is suing you and thus has a
burden of proof to meet that you are in fact in breach of some
contract with them as alleged.
It seems clear that you've put a lot of stress on the importance of
having a witness present.
No, I didn't.
Actually, from what I recall, literally all you did was say "Cop
out.". There was no question mark, no request of any kind. Just a two word
sentence.
I'll recap. Something happened; I provided a theory that fits the
observed facts and noted that none of the more usual suspects would
fit these particular facts; you then asserted without evidence that my
theory was wrong. I pointed out that none of the usual more-plausible
explanations were applicable in this case, barring an astronomically
improbable set of coincidences, and challenged you to furnish an
alternative theory that didn't involve such coincidences. You then
refused, I'm not sure if explicitly or simply by not responding;
regardless you never did furnish such an alternative theory. Yet you
continued to assert that mine was false.
This is disingenuous at best. If you think someone's theory is false,
either point to evidence of this (something it predicts that is wrong)
or provide an alternative theory that fits the facts and either makes
additional predictions (more predictive power) that test true or is
more parsimonious without requiring outrageously improbable
coincidences.
If you can do neither then you have no business asserting, as if it
were known fact, that the other theory is wrong.
I don't *need* them. I just *want* them.
Why pollute the newsgroup and attack and insult me in the process of
seeking them out?
You do if you're trying to argue with my about overclocking.
But it is YOU who is trying to argue with ME about overclocking. I'm
not here to argue, remember? Only to debunk bogosities and defend
myself. You're the one who came here with some sort of axe to grind.
You are the one seeking to argue.
[insults me and calls me a liar]
If you're going to continue being gratuitously insulting I'm going to
have to insist on becoming less civil in my responses to you, asshole.
This is EXACTLY what Intel does. I'm shocked at how much difficulty
you have of understanding this.
No, you claimed that they sometimes sell, say, 3GHz-capable chips
downclocked to 2GHz and not disclosed to be capable of error-free
operation at the higher speed. Either ones they knew worked at 3GHz,
or ones they never tested at higher speeds than 2GHz.
If this isn't true then that whole sub-argument becomes academic.
Or are you redefining "their best speed" to mean "the highest speed
they were actually tested at" rather than "the highest speed they will
have error-free operation at"? (The latter as determined by testing at
higher speeds until a speed is reached at which they no longer work
correctly.)
[snip a bunch of patronizing and insulting, rude twaddle]
**** off.
The test is not a boolean
"OK/NOT OK", therefore "the top speed at which the chip tested OK" is
meaningless.
Then the test is the wrong test to be using. The top speed at which
the chip shows, given adequate cooling (its surface temperature
doesn't exceed whatever), error-free operation is what's important.
You get your full value from the chip if you run it at that speed
(with adequate cooling). (Your best value proposition for the
combination of the chip and its cooling might be a bit lower speed, if
the highest speed requires very expensive additional cooling for
little additional speed, such as water cooling in place of just a fan
and heatsink to get another couple of dozen MHz out of it on top of
3GHz you were already getting.)
[quoted insult and rebuttal from earlier snipped]
Sorry, I'm just defending truth and justice here. We're actually on
the same team in this regard, remember?
No, you are just claiming that in order to try to make your insult
more believable. If it were true you would a) never insult me and b)
never disagree with me at all.
The software works fine on one chip, but doesn't work on the other
chip. Therefore the two chips are not "perfectly good substitute". Unless
you have a different definition of "perfectly good substitute" than I do.
No, I apparently have a different definition of "works fine" than you
do. The software that "works fine" on the slower chip is actually just
as buggy there. It presumably uses clock cycles as a proxy for
guesstimating wall-clock time instead of the BIOS clock or other such
timing facility. As such it WILL screw up. What happens when it runs
slower, because of multitasking? It thinks the time's earlier than it
is instead of later. Maybe some security cert is supposed to expire at
a certain time but lasts a full hour longer allowing an attack. That's
a pretty serious bug, just as serious as if the security cert expires
too soon after upgrading the machine to a faster CPU.
Mostly, in practise, the only software you see with such broken
behaviors was originally designed for non-PC hardware, often game
consoles, where every unit had exactly the same clock speed and every
unit had exactly the same video subsystem as well. They tend to be
tied to either CPU cycles or the video framerate instead of wall-clock
time, and generally if you run them on different hardware it's with an
emulator that forces the correct timing behavior independently of the
real hardware's speed.
(Ironically, Quake 3, mentioned earlier, ties some things to video
framerates resulting in worse approximations in the game physics the
lower the video framerate. But the basic mechanics do not speed up or
slow down depending on hardware capabilities, only the time resolution
of the simulation, though tying that time resolution to video
framerate, rather than fixing it as a possibly-higher constant
consistent with the minimum CPU requirements listed for the game to
work properly, seems somewhat boneheaded.)
Buggy software doesn't count. Buggy software will behave incorrectly
and will require updating or using a workaround, guaranteed. In the
case of software that does something "too fast" on newer hardware,
using emulation (e.g. VMWare) or deliberately saturating the CPU with
equal-priority tasks to slow it down are such workarounds.
Yes, but if I order a 1.5Ghz chip and I tell you I very specifically
need a 1.5Ghz chip and for special reasons, and you send me a 2.0Ghz chip,
telling me to downclock it, I'm not going to be very satisfied with your
service.
Perhaps. But it remains true that the 2GHz chip can do anything the
1.5GHz chip can do at the same speed; it can also do more, or the same
stuff faster, which is pure gravy.
Yes, our definitions differ. My definition is "one can be replaced by
the other without any ill effects".
And your 2GHz chip can be used without any ill effects, perhaps given
that you downclock it.
Perhaps because your claiming I'm wrong is not a particularly strong
deterrent?
It doesn't matter. You should not be trying to deter me from doing
anything, and you should certainly not be publicly insulting me and
calling my honesty and competence into question. You should, in fact,
probably be shutting up, or at worst continuing this in a purely
civil, non-hostile manner.
[more insulting asides and similar nonsense snipped]
Actually, I got my copy for free.
Of Vista? In this one instance, you're probably right about getting
the quality you paid for.
I'm guessing you defend it not because you don't want to admit you
wasted money, but because you don't want to admit you wasted time and
perhaps lost data converting your system to something that turned out
to be almost wholly inferior to the OS it previously had. The costs of
switching are what you don't want to admit were a deadweight loss, and
further, don't want to incur again replacing Pista with something
decent.
FSF is known to be anti-Microsoft. I'm surprised you were unaware of
this.
I'm aware of it alright, but they are against Microsoft misdeeds
harming consumers, and they have no financial stake in Microsoft's
success or failure as a business.
It has nothing to do with perfect or imperfect information. The
primary factor is the metric that the rational utilitarian is working
with. If their metrics are arranged such that they favor Vista over XP,
then they will migrate from XP to Vista. Simple as that.
The metric that matters with computers is "what can I do with it, how
reliably, and how fast?" With Vista versus XP, it's "less, less
reliably, and slower" unless it's one of a handful of (almost
exclusively Microsoft published) games.
Any other metric is not a rational, utilitarian choice of metric in
this case.
I find this amusing, especially after you criticize my reading
comprehension.
I find this insulting. The fact is Vista's selling points according to
that article are its prettiness and various surface UI changes and
functionality, some of which is not really all it's cracked up to be
and all of which can be achieved on an XP box using cheap or free
third-party software without incurring either the expense of Vista or
the problem of Vista being rotten at the core -- designed from the
ground up to thwart some actions the user might desire to do,
nevermind buggy as all get out and with poor support so far from
software and hardware vendors (other than, of course, Microsoft).
The important qualities of an OS are not superficial functions of the
default shell or other things it comes with, but the underlying kernel
layer, APIs, and other such stuff. This core is superior in XP to
Vista for a variety of reasons, not least of them DRM-related. Vista's
core is not designed with the owner's wishes at heart, and as such it
is not a sensible choice for anyone who wishes to truly be a system
administrator. XP is better. Linux is probably *way* better.
Aha! So you agree that there are some things about Vista that are
better than XP. I'm glad we got that settled.
Except it is a superficial feature that could be achieved on XP with a
(kernel-mode) third-party addon.
Vista, of course, means you're stuck with how those things work. There
will be no inexpensive third-party kernel-mode add-ons and device
drivers for Vista because of new draconian licensing and "driver
signing" policies by Microsoft, designed to (among other things) force
the makers of such to aid and abet Microsoft's evil DRM and, of
course, to funnel more money to Microsoft. All explained away as
needed to ensure a "better user experience" and "more reliable
operating system", of course.
Factually false. Switching from DOS 1.0 to Windows XP is a
"fundamental change that you can't easily undo and that affects a machine
you administer", but most people would argue that it is a "good" change.
If you prefer Linux over Windows, then switching DOS 1.0 to Linux is
another fundamental change that you may perceive to be "good".
Wasn't the original situation where the fundamental change would be
forced on you without getting a choice in the matter?
Anyway system administrators can make a software change easily
undoable if they can back the system's state up to tape or whatever.
Of course, doing this without running afoul of the Kopyright Kops
might not be so easy, especially given BS like "product activation"
and "genuine advantage notifications"...
[snip further insulting blather]
Notice that you EXPLICITLY stated that you wanted someone who "makes a
business of reviewing stuff like this", thus asking for a professional
blogger.
I MEANT someone who does it routinely and as a part of their normal
business, not necessarily as a "business" as in a money-making one.
Stop putting words in my mouth.
* You claimed "Vista sucks because Vista sucks".
* I said that's circular argument.
* You said it's impossible to make a non-circular argument about why Vista
sucks (that's already a WTF) because it's like showing why Ketchup is red:
It's red because it's red.
* I showed you that Ketchup is not red "because" it's red. It's red
because it has food coloring, thus showing you wrong again.
* You snip the whole thing and call it pointless.
Is that a fair summary of what happened here?
No, of course not. I claimed that defining what "sucks" means
eventually leads in circles, the same way as defining what "red" means
eventually leads in circles, so your claim that it's circular is not a
valid criticism (it could be applied to just about anything else
involving definitions).
Basically, Vista is for all practical purposes (no, games are not a
"practical purpose") inferior to XP. You claim that it does not suck
despite this. Apparently it boils down to a dispute over the
definition of "sucks", rather than over any observable traits of Vista
or of XP.
Well, you made a false inference. I'm glad we cleared that up.
No, I did not, you lying insulting asshole.
You said having none was bad (without, I might add, any supporting
evidence). Implying having some is better than having none (which
you've also stated outright a time or two). Therefore that (relative
to the alternative) having copyright law is good.
Of course, you're wrong, and having it is bad, and you can't face up
to having lost so you're again trying to weasel out of it by
redefining terms and rewriting history creatively.
I said *I* like Vista better than XP.
Which doesn't disprove my assertion that Vista sucks. It only means
that not only does Vista suck, but you are insane and probably a
masochist, or else just ridiculously lucky. (If you were so lucky that
you fell into a pile of manure and came up smelling like roses would
it be evidence that manure didn't stink? I don't think so!)
I did not say Vista is
objectively better than XP. It's very difficult to prove that anything is
objectively better than anything else. We both know this. That's why you
keep trying to push this strawman onto me: because you know I'll have
great difficulty proving it, and thus you'll be able to "win" the
argument.
This is a curious reversal of what's actually true -- it's not a
straight inversion into the obvious lie, but something with a more
complex symmetrical relationship to the truth.
The truth being that it is easy to determine by a straight up
comparison of performance and behavior that XP is superior to Vista,
and we both know this; that's why you keep trying to push this
strawman (of trying to redefine "superior" to "what you happen to
like" instead of "what works better") onto me: because you know you'll
have great difficulty "proving" Vista is objectively anything but a
pig of a so-called "operating system", and thus I'd be able to win the
argument.
I'm more interested in unveiling
the truth. You're trying to "win" by twisting my words.
This is ironic. I'm the one interested in unveiling the truth. You're
the one trying to "win" by twisting words. In this case the truth is
that Vista sucks. It really does. Nearly everything it can do, XP can
do faster and better. Nearly everything else it can do, XP and
inexpensive third-party software can do faster and better. And what's
left over is a couple of games, and sooner or later someone will make
an (unauthorized, perhaps) DirectX10 capability for WinXP and that
will be the end of that.
You on the other hand managed to paint yourself into a corner where
you have to prove Vista is better or lose. Oops; sucks to be you.
Unfortunately, instead of gracefully capitulating in the face of
overwhelming evidence for Vista's suckitude, you insist on trying to
weasel out of it by redefining every word in sight such that Vista
would only suck if everyone on the planet agreed that it sucked, then
pointing to Microsoft's bean counters as "evidence" that Vista rocks!
You are truly mad.
I'm trying to
discover truth, whether that means I "win" or I "lose". I really don't
care about winning or losing this argument.
If that's true, then why don't you just nod your head in agreement
whenever I say something or better yet shut the hell up and just read
and lurk and thereby become better educated?
Yeah, I wouldn't know how to defend your position either. Must be
tough. =/
This is disingenuous and the implications are insulting. My position
was and is perfectly sound. See below.
I'm not claiming Vista is great.
Well you disputed my claim that XP is better than Vista. What are you
now trying to say, that Vista sucks but XP sucks even more?
Pick a
position, STATE IT CLEARLY, and then STICK WITH IT for Chrissake!
I'm claiming that *I* like Vista, and that I am not the only one.
I never disputed that. There are nutjobs that like being chained and
whipped too. It doesn't mean the general population should be
subjected to the same treatment and expected to like it and not claim
that it sucks.
I demonstrate a second person, and you said
that wasn't good enough, so I presented a third. How many people do I have
to present until you understand that I am not the only person in the world
who likes Vista?
One other, but that's a straw man argument. The dispute is over
whether XP is better than Vista, not over how many people like such-
and-such. What people like is irrelevant. Which OS is the more logical
choice for typical computing needs is relevant and it's XP.
[snip more insult-suggesting blather]
Agreed. This was never about Vista objectively being superior to XP.
It was about the superiority of Vista being subjective.
No, it isn't. The superiority of XP (not Vista) is objective,
verifiable fact. (Just compare core kernel functionality performance,
and note that any game using DirectX10 could be reimplemented with the
latest OpenGL standards to make it work better and work on XP).
I disagree. The original discussion was whether "Vista sucks" is an
objective or subjective statement. I've proven that it's a subjective
statement by showing that *I* don't think it sucks. Is it clear now?
This is ludicrous. Now you're claiming the original discussion is not,
now, what the original discussion was a few days ago when we had the
original discussion? How the **** can that even be physically
possible?
As always there is BOTH an objective truth (which is technically
superior for typical purposes) AND a subjective feeling (which someone
likes more). The one has, in some irrational individuals, little to do
with the other.
Or are you now going to claim that because some nutters think they're
Napoleon and are alive and well in various padded cells, Napoleon's
date of death being May 5, 1821 is a subjective rather than an
objective statement?
All you've done is provided a mapping from the "normal" integers to
the ring of integers mod 3. You haven't actually introduced an element
called "4" into the ring of integers mod 3 and of course, you can't.
Sure I can. The element called "1" can also logically be called "4".
Or has the idea that one thing can legitimately have more than one
name not occurred to you?
There
are exactly 4 elements in that ring: 0, 1, 2 and 3.
Aren't there only three? The canonical names being 0, 1, and 2 (but 0
also being 3 and 6 and 9 and -3 ... and so forth).
You took "4" from the "normal" integers,
and mapped it onto "1" in the ring. That doesn't mean there now exists an
element "4" in the ring. Is it clear now?
No, it means there always was an element "4" in the ring, but that the
element "4" is the same element as the element "1" -- two different
names for the same object, rather than two separate objects (whereas
in the regular integers they refer to two distinct objects).
[snip more content-free blather]
[snip a bunch of insulting twaddle impugning both my education in the
mathematical areas and my intelligence and honesty]
Go away. You're bothering me.
No, I have as much right to post on USENET as you do.
You have no right to insult me in the manner described, however. Find
something more constructive to post or shut up.
[snip more twaddle and blather]
That was not the point I was arguing against.
But it was the point that I was making. If indeed you responded
arguing against the wrong point (i.e. any point other than the point
that I was making) then at best you've made a colossal mistake and
failed to rebut my point and at worst you deliberately tried another
strawman type argument and still failed to rebut my point.
In the future, if I make a point X by stating an argument for X, and
you respond negatively, but you intend to claim some unrelated thing Y
instead of not-X, then STATE THIS CLEARLY AND UP-FRONT. Moreover,
don't imply that you are somehow countering what I said about X if in
fact you're talking about Y instead!
Otherwise I will assume, and rightly, that you are trying to disprove
X from the fact that you responded in a hostile manner to my argument
for X without making any mention of Y. And demonstrate how your
argument does not disprove X but only proves something unrelated (Y)
and how you are therefore wrong. If you don't like that, state up
front that you intend to prove Y rather than disprove X. Better yet,
don't put it in as an apparent rebuttal of X. Better still, post a
whole new thread with Y in the Subject: header arguing in favor of Y,
since it's clearly a whole new at-best-tangential topic instead of a
response to X.
Here, you are assuming that "acting hostilely towards me" is something
which is objective.
Of course it is you bloody nincompoop! If someone does something
unpleasant to me without my consent that is "acting hostilely" if they
did it intending those effects and with "callous disregard" if they
did it without such intent. Pretty much by definition. If someone
punches me in the nose without my consent that is clearly hostile at
worst, and an accident resulting from callous disregard at best (e.g.
making sure I'm the person they intended to punch and not some
innocent lookalike; or not watching where they were putting their
hands while gesticulating wildly, resulting in accidental collision of
a hand and my nose; or whatever).
There is nothing subjective to this. Either something connected with
my nose or it didn't, and either I consented to such an impact or I
didn't. If I joined a rugby game I probably implicitly consented to
it. If I am just standing somewhere minding my own business it's
safest to assume that I did not.
Likewise with any other conduct that is damaging to me.
There have been plenty examples of you thinking people
have been acting hostilely towards you, while several other third party
bystander agreed that they were not acting hostile towards you. Isn't this
an indication that your perception of hostility is subjective?
No, it's an indication that those bystanders are wrong, or confused as
to how such things are correctly to be defined. Conduct that is
damaging to me and that I did not consent to is hostile, with someone
demonstrating at best a callous disregard for the consequences to me
and at worst an actual malicious intent. A doctor sticking me with a
needle, with my consent, clearly isn't a hostile act (unless I'm
deceived as to what's being injected or something of the sort). On the
other hand, someone publicly smearing me, either intending to do so or
as a side effect of something else they said, clearly is. At best they
wrote the first thing that popped into their little brains with no
regard for the consequences to me; at worst they intentionally and
maliciously sought to smear me.
It's sad that you seem to forget the possibility that a so-called
"hostile" person might post something which doesn't need rebuttal because
their post is entirely true.
Ignoring the insulting suggestion that something insulting towards me
could ever be accurately described as "true", there's the simple and
plain fact that if someone claims something negative about me, it
better serves my interests that their claim not be believed than that
their claim be believed no matter what!
[insults me and calls me a liar]
You definitely listed non-English-language countries. I can't remember
them offhand and I am certainly not rereading every 600-line post in
this fucking thread just to satisfy your curiosity and make up for
your poor memory, but you definitely did all the same!
China was definitely one of them.
I have to admit you had me fooled for a moment here. When I wrote
these things, I was working under the impression you were from the the US.
I now know you're from Canada. Sorry about making that false assumption.
Where did I claim to be from either place?
More examples of your poor communication skills. Elsewhere you seem to
support a nonzero term length, yet this sentence seems to imply that
you don't.
Like I said, you're [insult deleted]. [Condescension deleted.]
Consider the concept of
ice cream. It is neither good nor bad. A little bit of ice cream on a hot
summer day is better than no ice cream at all. A good portion of ice cream
is better than a little bit. But having such a huge mound of ice cream
that it affects the ecology and weather system of your country is bad.
Similarly, the concept of copyright itself is neither good nor bad. A
little bit of copyright is better than none at all. A "good portion" is
better than a little bit. But so much copyright that even 200 years from
now, we won't be able to make use of the Mickey Mouse character, is bad.
No, even a little bit is bad. Dangerous and bad. Even a little bit is
enough to "affect the weather" in an adverse manner.
I neither like nor dislike copyright. Copyright is a tool, just like
any other. There are some problems which copyright solves, and there are
other problems for which copyright is the wrong tool. And like any other
tool, copyright, when used improperly, can cause more harm than good.
If you don't like copyright why argue vehemently against its complete
abolition?
Also, name one problem which copyright solves without creating an even
bigger problem and which cannot be solved in other ways. As far as
tools go, using copyright to solve any problem is like using a
sledgehammer to perform surgery. In fact, using anything resembling
copyright for any reason is rather like using communism, except not
quite as awful; instead of letting the free market develop solutions
for matching supply to demand and decide fair prices you enshrine a
particular business model in law and let suppliers arbitrarily set
prices instead. Very Soviet, and demonstrably inferior in various
terms, ranging from freedoms to economic efficiency to long-term
viability and scalability.
Any use at all for copyright is improper.
Your argument that it's "just a tool" could be applied equally to laws
establishing a divine right of a king to unquestioned obedience, or a
practise of slavery, or any of a number of similar abominations from
the history books now recognized as universally bad and worthy of
explicitly outlawing at the constitutional level because they might
otherwise one day become an "attractive nuisance" the legislature is
tempted to use as a tool to solve some problem or other, and it's
known that any use, however noble, tends to make things worse. The
Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was like that. Many would say
nuclear weapons are another such tool.
Slave owning could be argued to solve all kinds of problems, from
export of labor and brain drains to making debt more to be feared to
providing an alternative to an overloaded prison system for punishing
nonviolent crimes and so forth, but I would argue it should never be
allowed regardless. (And a lot of nonviolent crimes not involving
grand theft should not be punished anyway, and most or all of the rest
only with fines. I treat all crimes that cause physical or
psychological trauma as "violent" for this purpose.)
[more condescension and insults snipped]
* You claimed Trademark is not a form of IP.
No, I didn't. I claimed specific reformed versions of trademark would
not be, and that trademark has few of copyright or patent's evil
consequences, particularly anticompetitive consequences, and if
somewhat reformed speech-chilling consequences too. In particular I
advocated replacing trademarks as a transferrable property with
tougher consumer-protection laws couched in terms of consumer
protection from confusion and deception as to the origins and contents
of products and services, thus removing the "property" element
entirely and making the replacement legal structures not amenable to
the sorts of abuse observed with trademark law, or the perverse
incentives (such as to sue everyone in sight to be seen to be
defending the mark).
No. You win. Like I said, I don't care about this game. If it makes
you happy to win, then you win. If it makes you happy to lose, then you
lose. Whatever outcome you want for this game, you got it.
Then why the hell isn't it over?
That's funny. I clearly stated that I posted the markup intentionally.
Okay then, and I clearly stated that a) it's not any sort of well-
formed SGML-derived markup, despite appearances, because among other
things the DTD declaration is missing; b) it's also nothing my news
reading software (namely Google Groups) recognizes as such; and c)
regardless of what sort of markup it is it doesn't belong in this
newsgroup regardless, other than perhaps as part of some applet- or
JSP-related discussion that involves code snippets. Which this isn't.
See how you've placed markup just now?
As a code snippet illustration.
intentionally posting tags, except I close them properly. Is it clear now?
What part of "this is a text-only group, so outside of code snippets
no markup is welcome, and my newsreader doesn't render it except as
raw source code anyway" don't you understand?
The source code is, sure, but whatever it's supposed to mean to a
suitably markup-aware browser it's likely to fall flat without at
least a DTD line. Used to be text with random markup sprinkled inside
was the standard for web pages once, mind you; tag soup will often
not just said:
Good, then my posts are working exactly as intended.
*blinks* But I said the posts, as viewed, appear as raw source rather
than rendered. And this isn't a context where the source is the topic
of discussion (versus, say, some discussion of applet tag usage
elsewhere in cljp that might be illustrated with example code or this-
isn't-working problem code or whatever).
In short, you're basically claiming to have done something more or
less equivalent to posting a Java code snippet that outputs some
paragraph of text not as part of a Java discussion where the snippet
is illustrative, but rather simply to *say the paragraph of text*.
This is so mind-bogglingly broken behavior that I'm not sure how to
describe it, or which psychiatric subspecialty would be your best hope
of treatment.
[snip more insults]
I intended for you to see the plain text which I wrote.
I didn't see plain text. I saw source code for rich text. So you
obviously failed.
Yes. I'm glad you are gradually starting to understand, though I wish
your comprehension would come more quickly.
I find your manner insulting and rude, and growing more so over time
with each new exchange in this thread. Moreover, if I don't
"comprehend quickly" what you are doing it is generally because you
are doing something insane or stupid such that there are a thousand
more plausible explanations than whatever crazy thing you're claiming
is true.
I guess you're assuming that the tags employed are intended to be a
form of HTML.
They seem to be SGML-derived. HTML has <blockquote> tags which may be
what you had in mind but misspelled; or it could be an XML schema
instead.
I suppose you're now going to claim that they were actually intended
to be perl or something else equally ridiculous.
[snip more insulting rudeness]
* You tell me to read an online book arguing for the abolishment of IP.
* I tell you the authors of the book do not make logically sound
arguments.
* You ask for an example.
* I post a quote in which the authors argue that because basketball is
good, competition is good.
I don't think that is exactly what they were arguing. I'm fairly sure
they were using basketball as an example to illustrate that
competition can be a good thing, and in particular can be an incentive
to excel at a task.
Regardless, you never even came close to supporting your assertion
that they "do not make logically sound arguments". To do that you
would need to confirm the absence of any logically sound arguments
anywhere in the whole corpus of text. I find that unlikely.
Also obviously, your claim that IIS could not compete, even in the
figurative sense of "could not compete" that you defined, is false.
No, it is not. A temporary shift in market share due to an aggressive
advertising campaign is not meaningful. Especially when it's likely
the increase is mainly due to new deployments on Microsoft and
affiliates' servers. I don't think Apache is in danger of losing its
core user base any time soon, not when IIS administrators have to
clean out another Sasser-type infestation every few weeks or, worse,
await the "Malicious Software Removal Tool of the Month(tm)" with
bated breath, while Apache administrators can say "Worm? What's a
worm?" ...
